How do I summarise a long PDF without uploading the file?

A forty-page report lands in your inbox with a note saying "can you look at this by Friday". What you actually need first is not the report. It is two minutes of knowing what the report is, so you can decide how much of Friday it deserves.

That is the job a summary does, and it is worth being precise about how one gets made — because "upload your document to an AI" is not something everybody is comfortable doing with a contract.

What happens to your file

There are two things people mean by "uploading a PDF", and they are not the same.

The file. The PDF itself — images, signatures, embedded attachments, the lot. Summarize PDF never sends this anywhere. Your browser opens it and reads the words out of it on your own machine, the same way it would if you opened it in a PDF reader.

The text. The words your browser found. To write a summary in real sentences, that text is sent to an AI service, which writes the summary and sends it back. Nothing is stored — not the text, not the summary.

So the honest one-line version is: the document stays on your device; its words are used once to write the summary. The tool says exactly that on the page before you choose a file, because anyone is entitled to know it first.

Short or detailed

Both come from the same reading. The difference is how much of it you are shown.

• Short is the paragraph you would give someone who asked "what is this?" — what the document is, who it concerns, and the figure or date that matters most.
• Detailed keeps that and adds the rest: the parties, the amounts, the dates, the terms, and anything that asks somebody to do something.

Use Short to decide whether to read the document. Use Detailed when you have decided you are not going to read all of it and need to know what you would be missing.

Can you trust the numbers?

The model is told to use only what the document says and to quote any figure exactly as it is written, rather than working one out. In testing on a real invoice, the totals, dates and bank details came back character for character.

That is a strong reason to trust a summary for deciding what to read. It is not a reason to sign something you have only seen summarised. A summary is written to be read quickly, and quickly is the opposite of what a contract needs.

When it will not work

Scanned documents. A scan is a picture of words, so there is no text for your browser to read and nothing to summarise. The tool tells you so instead of producing an empty summary. Run the file through OCR PDF first — that turns the picture back into text — then summarise the result.

The quick test: try to select a line of text in your PDF reader. If it highlights, there is text. If the whole page selects as one block, it is a scan.

Forms, receipts and tables. These are mostly labels and numbers with very little prose. You will get an accurate description of what the document is, but there is not much to condense.

If the AI summary is not available

Every visitor has a daily allowance of AI-written summaries. When yours is used up, the tool says so plainly rather than failing silently. You are not left with nothing: the page also works out a summary inside your browser from the document's own sentences, and that one is shown instead.

The same thing happens if the AI service is briefly unavailable — you still get the in-browser summary, and nothing about your file changes.

Other languages

The summary is written in the language the document is written in. A Bangla report gets a Bangla summary, and a document mixing Bangla and English is handled as it is.